Reflection on American Sniper by Chris Kyle with Jim DeFelice and Scott McEwen

               American Sniper is the memoir of Chris Kyle, a Navy SEAL who served in Iraq and set the record for most confirmed sniper kills by a US soldier. I saw the movie when it came out but I had neverread the book until I came across it on GoodReads and wanted to check it out. You could describe Kyle as a sort of stereotype of a military guy, and I don’t think he’d be offended by that. He loved to fight, enjoyed battle, and hated America’s enemies. He hated them very much. I found some parts of his memoir hard to believe (specifically a story of him taking down “one of the biggest drug dealers” in an American city more or less by accident) but in general it was really interesting and exciting. I liked that his wife contributed to it, so you get her side of the story as well.

               The relationship between Chris and his wife, Taya, is probably the biggest conflict of the book. He basically lets her know several times that she comes second to his SEAL buddies and he reenlists despite her wishes for him to come home to be with her and their children. His relationship with all of them suffers due to his time away in combat. He’s also very immature. He fights people constantly and at one point missed his kid’s birthday party because he was in court defending himself against charges of assault. His relationship with his wife became even more strained when he started communicating again with an old girlfriend. I found all of these examples to be really gross aspects of his personality.

               I’m not sure which Chris Kyle loved more: his country or violence. Whatever it is, they are both very high up there for him and he made a great soldier. I think the key points he makes throughout the book about the Iraq War is that first of all, the soldiers did not decide to go to war. He found it disgusting that people were protesting his platoon as they deployed, as they were the ones making the sacrifice, not the ones deciding. In addition, he points out that if we want to go to war, we need people like him. War isn’t pretty and attempts to sanitize it are futile. He explains how, from the soldier’s perspective, all the claims of civilian casualties are kind of ridiculous since it’s a war- lots of people are going to die. There’s no war in history where civilians don’t die and in Iraq, the US forces were held to a much higher standard (obviously) than the insurgents. While my opinions about the Iraq War are unchanged, I do feel more sympathy for those soldiers who fought in it and didn’t earn the love of their country like WWII soldiers did. In the end, the sacrifice is the same no matter what the war.

Reflection on Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport

               I quit Instagram and Facebook when I started this book, which jumped the gun a little, but I don’t regret it. In the book, Newport lays out the case for a one-month digital detox to get you unhooked from your electronics. I think the book is good and if you are looking for motivation to quit your social networks, this is it. I don’t particularly like the writing style, which was very pop-economicsy if you know what I’m saying. Like Malcolm Gladwell. I’m just kind of sick of that style but whatever. I did learn that Amish people don’t reject all technology though. It’s actually that they try out each new one and decide thumbs-up or thumbs-down on it. For example, they have solar panels but not cars because cars are used to leave the community and solar panels are used to power it. Amish people are pretty successful in building their communities though, with 80-90 percent of young people choosing to stay after Rumspringa, their time away to experience the outside world. However, the author mentions that the Amish communities are pretty sexist in a very “traditional” kind of way. So that’s what I got from this book.

Reflection on Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? By William G. Dever

               I read this book shortly after finishing Who Wrote the Bible?, with “Bible” being a textual analysis of the Hebrew bible and “Who” being an archaeological analysis of the land of Israel to find evidence of who lived there in the 13^th-10^th centuries. I have to say that I liked “Bible” better because it was more readable, though this was a very thorough look at the latest in archaeology. I love that both books make common reference to the academic communities they work in and in this book, William Dever seemed obsessed with refuting this guy Finkelstein, which was pretty funny. It reminded me of Timmy Turner’s dad and “DINKELBERG!!!”

               I learned some pretty important facts in this book. For example, while people used to think that the Exodus occurred in the 15^th century B.C., scholars now believe it happened in the 13^th century, if there was an Exodus at all. Israelite peoples were potentially indigenous to the region, as the archaeological record does not show a big change in material culture between Canaanites and Israelites during that time period. Perhaps what occurred, according to Dever, is that the Israelites were a group of refugees, semi-nomadic peoples, and “social bandits” who fled to the hill country in Judea and Samaria, out of reach of the invasion of the Pharaoh Merneptah. A nomadic people called the “Shasu” are referenced several times in texts of that period in relation to their God “Yhw,” AKA “Yahweh.” Interestingly, this area would be basically the same as Midian, where Moses supposedly attained knowledge of Yahweh from the burning bush. So it seems like a group of people coalesced on the border of the wilderness near the Jordan River and formed a new social/ethnic group in the 13^th-12^th centuries B.C. They were urban dropouts, “Social bandits” (rebels/brigands in the countryside), refugees, and pastoral nomads.

               Despite this seeming like a random group of people, the Merneptah or Victory Stele of 1208 B.C. refers to Israel as an ethnic group, meaning that by the end of the 13^th century, this was not just a group of people, but a cohesive set of tribes believed to come from the same ancestor. Therefore, when they fled into the wilderness, they had already believed themselves to be one ethnic group, since it was Merneptah that they were fleeing.

               The author argues that some of these Israelites ended up in Egypt or worked as slaves in Israel for the Egyptian Pharaoh and told their story, truly of only a portion of the Israelites, as the story of all of them, inserted into the Pentateuch as the Priestly (P) text. Or at least that’s how I understand it. That explains the lack of a change in material culture- because most Israelites were already living in Israel when a Moses-like leader led the rest out of Egypt or out of Egyptian bondage. While this may seem to “disprove” the Exodus, it really shows that the story is more like Thanksgiving. Both celebrate a group of people that are not the whole people. Most Americans are not descended from the Pilgrims much like most Jews and Israelites were not descended from the Jews of Egypt. However, the story serves as a metaphor that is recognized by the entire people.

Reflection on How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr

               Here’s a cool book that covers all the places that have bee “kind-of” in the United States throughout history. They include territories that later became states, like Illinois, Oklahoma, Alaska, and Hawaii, those that became independent countries, like the Philippines, and those that became something else, like Puerto Rico. It also talks about US military bases abroad, from Saudi Arabia to Japan.

               After the Louisiana Purchase, the next most important legal maneuver of the United States to add territory was the Guano Islands Act, which gave Americans the ability to claim any island that had guano on it, a type of bird poop very good for fertilizing farms. It created a legal framework to bring new land into the US domain without making it a state and also had strategic benefits years later, as those islands would become ideal for air bases. However, the United States’ decision to become an empire came late. It wasn’t fully enacted until the Spanish-American War at the end of the 18^th century, when colonialism was already in decline, and soon the colonies the US took would be repudiated, not in any legal way, but in the minds of American citizens, who refused to see their country as a colonial oppressor.

               I’m not really feeling like writing this all out, but despite record numbers of men volunteering for the US Army from the territories, places like Hawaii, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico were exploited and the people were treated like second-class citizens, which they literally are in Puerto Rico to this day. This book is also a good look at the history of American foreign policy and recommendable to those interested in that sort of thing.

Reflection on Who Wrote the Bible? By Richard Elliott Friedman

               This was a cool book. It asks the titular question and goes into a literary analysis of the Old Testament, showing how different lines and phrases imply different authors, and explaining his hypotheses to the reader with references to archaeological evidence. It is very convincing, but that might be mainly because I knew so little about this stuff going in.

               The book covers the books in order, starting with the Pentateuch, showing that by separating the text into parts that refer to Yahweh and parts that use other names for God, you find that the text is actually at least two texts pushed together. Then, by separating another portion that deals greatly with law and priests by identifying key phrases, you can find another author. Friedman claims that his undergraduate students can learn to tell the authors apart in weeks. Basically, Friedman thinks that there were two versions of the bible that were combined when the Assyrian Empire conquered Israel, the northern Hebrew kingdom, in 722 BC and dispersed its people, who came from various Hebrew tribes that would later, due to this, be known as the lost tribes. Judah remained, and refugees flowed in, bringing their version of the Jewish origin story. He uses interesting observations to determine this. For example, the J version (mentions Yahweh) refers to the ark that housed the Ten Commandments several times, but E (the version from Israel) never mentions it at all. This makes sense because the ark was in Jerusalem, part of Judah, which wanted to emphasize its importance, while Israel would want to diminish it. He thinks that J was written in Judah between 848-722 BC and that E was written in Israel between 922-722 BC. It is interesting to read the examples the author gives of how you can split the text up and find two flood stories and several stories that are in one but not the other.

               Friedman’s book is especially captivating because he often tells tales of his own life as a biblical researcher, explaining how he and his mentors have come up with ideas, making the whole book a lot more relatable. He emphasizes that the Bible was the first attempt at writing history and that for it to be written or compiled by anyone other than Moses does not reduce its importance. After all, a faithful Jew would recognize that those who wrote it were doing so based on their own revelations from God.

Reflection on Salt: World’s history by Mark Kurlansky

               The history of salt reminded me of the book I read about oil by Daniel Yergin, however, while the commodity described by Yergin became much more important in the 19^th century, salt became much less importance due to the development of refrigeration and other preservation methods. What I mainly got from this book was the fun facts that are listed below. I guess it is also important to note that salt was an absolutely crucial thing to have for millennia until refrigeration was invented, reducing demand and when vacuum production of salt was developed, drastically increasing supply. Today, salt is so plentiful that the most common use is to throw it onto roads to keep them from freezing. In the USA, only 8 percent of salt is for food, 52 percent is for salting northern highways.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• The first recorded use of natural gas was in China in the year 200 AD, when it was discovered in deep salt mines and used for boiling brine.
• The word soldier comes from the same root as the word salt, as soldiers were paid in salt in ancient times.
• Anglo-Saxons called a saltworks a “wich,” so towns with “wich” in the name are likely sites of old saltworks or named after a town with saltworks.
• To begin pickling, you must make a brine. To know if the brine is salty enough, you can use the oldest method there is, test it by placing an egg into the brine. If the egg floats, you are ready to begin pickling.
• Butter, because it easily spoils in the sunlight, tends to be a northern food, while those in southern Europe and in other places closer to the equator used oil, often olive oil.
• Ketchup derives its name from an Indonesian sauce of fish and soy called “kecap ikan.” Salty sauces made with fish could be found all over the world throughout history as condiments, from Rome (where it was called “garum”) to Japan, where it became soy sauce.
• Hunters in New England in colonial times used to leave red herring along their trail to confuse wolves by the scent, forming the origin of the phrase “red herring.”
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Reflection on The Years of Lyndon Johnson Volume 2: Means of Ascent by Robert Caro

               I would say the first book is better but this one has a really good finish. It is a lot of time, especially at the beginning, of building up. This book covers the seven years from Johnson’s 1941 loss in the Texas Senate special election to his victory in 1948, when he committed fraud to steal the election from “Mr. Texas,” Coke Stevenson. It starts slow. Until 1947, not much happens. Johnson does very little in Congress and is depressed. He eventually gets FDR to appoint him to be an observer in the Pacific (a short service with the Navy that he would later exaggerate to credulous crowds in the 1948 campaign) but returns depressed. Seeing that he had no future in the House, Johnson staked his entire political career on getting into the Senate in 1948. It would be one of the most famous elections of the century and also one of the most controversial.

               In Congress, Johnson had no power left. He was uninfluential and needed to leave. The war couldn’t have come sooner. Unlike some congressmen, who joined to fight at the front lines, Johnson became an observer, which meant several months partying on the west coast and then a short tour of the Pacific Theater. He flew in one mission and got very lucky not to be killed. He was originally slated to go in one plane but went to the bathroom. When he returned, that bomber was filled, and he went to another. The original was shot down and all the men aboard died. Returning to DC, he was unhappy, would yell at his wife in public, and fell into a depression. He spent seven years “in the wilderness,” and it was a rough time for him.

               Johnson was to create in 1948 a completely different type of political campaign never seen before in Texas. While in the past, candidates had commissioned polls sparingly, Johnson would do them weekly. While in the past, candidates had driven from town to town, giving speeches, Johnson would take a helicopter, the first political candidate in history to ever do so. While radio had been used before to deliver speeches, Johnson used his radio network and those of his allies to deliver complete shows and programs advocating for his candidacy. While most candidates raised small amounts of cash from loyal allies, Johnson pumped more money into the campaign than had ever been seen before.

               Despite these dramatic changes, Johnson had a long lead to catch up to. Coke Stevenson was the most popular politician in Texas history and Johnson started off very far behind. Things got worse when kidney stones hospitalized him after he had refused to see a doctor for weeks. In one dramatic moment, his assistant, Woodward, saves his entire political career when Johnson tells him, delirious, to call the media and tell them he’s dropping out. Woodward asks him to wait for his wife to arrive and orders the doctors to allow no media members in to see him. If Woodward had not done so, you have to imagine the United States without Vietnam, without the Civil Rights Act, and without the Great Society.

               In the last weeks of the campaign, Johnson realized he was going to lose. They had made up serious ground on Coke, but they had hit a wall. Despite wiretapping their opponents, using a helicopter, and injecting tons of cash into the election, Coke Stevenson was simply too popular. There was one last thing to try.

               The politics of the border had always been corrupt throughout Texas’ history. It was often delivered to candidates by “block voting,” where one candidate would win 95% of the border counties’ votes. In 1948, the Johnson campaign, in coordination with Judge/Boss George Parr and his deputy Luis Salas were going to bring the corruption to a never-before-seen level. They bought tons and tons of votes, spending more money than ever to have local sheriffs deliver their counties’ votes to Johnson in a bold show of amorality. However it still wasn’t enough. The day of the election showed that Johnson was still losing, though by margins of under 500 or even 100 votes in an election of over one million votes. At that point something mysterious happened. A ballot box (number 13) was found in Jim Wells county that had 200 more votes for Johnson after the election had ended. The votes were counted and Johnson won—by 87 votes.

               It wasn’t so suspicious. Upon further inspection by Coke Stevenson, those 200 votes were listed by voters in alphabetical order, with many by people who were not in the county that day, or others who were dead. By a 4-3 vote, the county Democratic Party voted to disqualify them, but by a 29-28 vote the state party allowed them. Then, one of the 29 decided to abstain, tying the vote! Johnson was in a panic. At that moment, one of his assistants found in the bathroom one of the voters, who had hid there to avoid voting. He dragged him out, where he voted for Johnson, delivering the position in the Senate to him. Stevenson would appeal in court, but Johnson, with the help of genius lawyer Abe Fortas would re-appeal, win the appeal, and enter the Senate. He stole the election. Years later, Luis Salas would reveal what had really happened, which was as many had suspected, that Johnson had stolen the election. But by that time, Johnson was dead and nothing could be changed. By the end of 1948, Johnson had stolen elections in San Mateo Teaching College, The Little Congress of congressional aides, and now the Senate. Once in the Senate, Johnson would begin a rise to power that can surely be counted as one of the most rapid of all-time in American politics.

               Caro is a great author and this book really confirmed it for me. Robert Caro is able to make the drama feel so important and the characters so real that you feel like this could be a great TV show or novel. I think that as a writer he is so good at making you wonder “How is it gonna happen?” when you already know that the ending will be Johnson’s victory. He also brings side characters and rivals to life with long chapters devoted to their life stories and personalities. In this book, Johnson’s antagonist is Coke Stevenson, also known as “Mr. Texas.” A true cowboy, Coke was famous around the state for being a true idealist and lover of democracy. He never ran for office so much as he was drafted and made to stand for office due to recognition of his honor. In Volume 1, Caro makes Sam Rayburn into the secondary figure of the book and in this one it’s Coke. The chapters that focus on him are incredible and portray him as the perfect foil to LBJ.

               I want to end with the last paragraph of the book, which sets up the next one and sounds pretty exciting:

“Within just two years, in January, 1951, Lyndon Johnson would be a leader, his party’s whip—an assistant floor leader who, moreover, very quickly began to invest that hitherto largely titular role with new significance. Just two years later, in January, 1953, he would be the Leader of his party, only Minority Leader since the Democrats had lost control of the Senate, but nonetheless the youngest floor leader in the history of the Senate. From that seat in the back row he had moved in only four years to the Democratic Leader’s front-row, center-aisle seat, sitting at the head of men who had served as many terms in that body as he had years there. And within weeks of his election as Leader, he would begin to revolutionize some of the Senate’s most sacrosanct traditions in order to concentrate the barons’ prerogatives in his own hands. By 1955, with the barons’ power broken and the Democrats back in the majority, Lyndon Johnson was the most powerful Majority Leader in history.”

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Politicians use two hands to shake hands because if they don’t, multiple people will try to shake their hands at the same time.